The Government should drop proposals for eco-towns in rural locations and concentrate instead on developing sustainable communities in urban areas, according to the chairman of Birmingham’s planning committee.

Councillor Peter Douglas Osborn said the council would be pushing ahead with its own plans to build five eco-towns within the Birmingham city boundary.

He said locations favoured by the Government for eco-towns including Long Marston, near Stratford-upon-Avon, and Curborough, near Lichfield, Staffordshire, made “no sense” because they were isolated from transport links and nowhere near urban centres.

The importance of landscape is neglected in the Government’s eco-towns plans, the Landscape Institute said this week.

Chair of the Landscape Institute Policy Committee Jon Lovell said eco-towns provided “an outstanding opportunity” but warned that the sustainability of the proposed eco-towns depended on the integration of landscape planning, design and management. He said that green space needed to be viewed as essential infrastructure – as equally as important as roads, services and other ‘grey’ infrastructure’ components.

First glimpses of how the multi-million million pound Walsall Waterfront development could look have been revealed after developers announced the final shortlist of designs.

We’re looking for a defining piece of architecture for Walsall and now have a shortlist of seven really powerful concepts to choose from.” The London-based contenders are Flacq and Featherstone Associates in a joint submission, Jacobs Architecture, Woods Bagot, Piercy Conner Architects and Type_O. In addition moh Architects (corr) from Vienna and Kirkland Fraser Moor Aldbury are in the frame.

Eco-towns should be built in urban areas and not in the countryside to stop them becoming “dormitory towns” where people have to drive somewhere else to work, town hall chiefs say.

Eco-towns should be built in urban areas, council chiefs claimEco-towns ‘should be built in urban areas’

A new report from the Local Government Association also warned that plans to create 10 eco-towns across the country were “significantly flawed” and risked creating “eco-slums” without proper urban planning.